Keys and Gates in The Night Cage

Every game of The Night Cage comes down to two kinds of tile. To win, each Prisoner must collect a Key. Then the whole group must gather on a single Gate, together, with their Keys in hand. This lesson looks at how Keys and Gates behave and how to keep track of them.

Claiming a Key

Key tiles are drawn and placed like any other tile. To claim one, move onto the Key tile and take a Key token from the reserve. Claiming is a free action.

Two rules shape everything after that. First, a Prisoner can carry only one Key at a time, because the other hand holds the candle. Second, Key tiles are Crumbling. The tile becomes a Pit on your next turn after you step onto it, so in practice each Key tile serves the one Prisoner who steps onto it. Move off on your next turn, or Stay and Fall.

The Key you cannot carry

The hardest moment with Keys comes when a Prisoner who already holds one reveals a Key tile. The rules name three ways to lose it:

• Walk away. If no Prisoner lights the space, the Key tile is discarded.
• Walk through. The tile crumbles into a Pit, and the Key goes with it.
• Block it. If you stand in the only Passage to it, nobody else can reach it.

There are two good answers. The first is to keep it lit. Stand where your candle still reaches the Key tile, without standing on it or blocking the way in, until a Prisoner without a Key can reach it. That costs time, and staying put costs a tile from the Draw Stack each turn you Stay, so it works best when a keyless friend is close.

The second answer uses passing. If a Prisoner without a Key is adjacent to you and connected by a Passage, hand them your Key, then move onto the Key tile and claim it yourself. Passing is a free action, so the handoff and the step can happen in one turn. When the pieces line up, it saves a Key that would otherwise be lost.

Passing Keys

A Prisoner may pass a held Key to another Prisoner when, on one of those Prisoners’ turns, they are adjacent and connected by a Passage. Adjacent alone is not enough; a wall between you blocks the handoff. Passing is free and can happen on either Prisoner’s turn.

Since every Prisoner needs a Key at the Gate, passing does not change how many Keys you need. What it changes is who has a free hand. The Prisoner nearest a fresh Key tile should usually be the one without a Key. Passing lets you arrange that.

Guarding a Gate

A Gate behaves like any other tile: when no Prisoner lights it, it is discarded. But a Gate is also the only tile that holds more than one Prisoner, and the rules say any number of Prisoners may stand on it at once. You need only one Gate to win, so once a reachable Gate is on the board, it is worth thinking about who keeps it lit while the others finish collecting Keys.

That is a real cost. A Prisoner guarding a Gate is not exploring. Whether to guard depends on how many Keys are still needed, how far away they are, and how many Gates are still unseen in the Draw Stack.

Counting Keys and Gates

The standard game tells you how many to expect. With 1 to 4 players there are 4 Prisoners and 6 Key tiles. With 5 players there are 5 Prisoners and 7 Key tiles. Either way, that is a spare of two Keys. There are 4 Gate tiles.

The Discard Board sorts discards by type, so the losses are public. A simple running count tells you a lot:

• Keys needed: Prisoners without a Key.
• Keys still possible: Key tiles on the board and lit, plus Key tiles not yet seen.
• Gates still possible: Gates on the board and lit, plus Gates not yet seen.

Keys leave the game when they are discarded from a Stay or a Monster penalty, when a Key tile falls out of the light, when one crumbles under a Prisoner who did not claim it, and when Final Flickers removes one from the board. Once the spare Keys are gone, every one of those losses ends the game. That is the moment to Stay less, sidestep Monsters with more care, and Block when you are hit.

How you lose

The Prisoners lose if all 4 Gates are lost, if they cannot each collect a Key, or if they cannot all bring their Keys to a Gate before the darkness isolates them. A Prisoner who Falls with no tile left to land on also ends the game in a loss.

The last condition is the one to watch late in the game. During Final Flickers, the board loses a lit tile at the end of every turn unless the Prisoner whose turn it was spends a Nerve to Sustain, and a Prisoner far from the group can be cut off. So a Gate the whole group can reach usually beats a Gate that is closer to just one of you.

For more on how cooperative games reward this kind of shared counting, see our piece on cooperative games and teamwork.